Escaping the Dark, Gray City offers a fundamentally new account of the American conservation movement. The first book-length synthetic history of conservation in fifty years, this book argues that conservation was a broad social movement that permanently altered the national landscape in ways that reflected both the perils and possibilities of the larger Progressivism of which it was a critical part. Conservationists understood themselves to be restoring a spiritually renewing and materially sustainable relationship with a nature made vulnerable by the unprecedented power of humanity. Conservation involved not only the remote forests and wildernesses that epitomized nature for many Americans, but also dense industrial cities, leafy suburbs, and private homes; it was as much about cultural revitalization as formal politics.